JoshK

Us middle class white suburbanites in Redmond on Education Hill will more than balance you mutants out. You gots style. We gots CASH. Redmond is where you buy a place when you want to sport a big house but don't have the real CASH to live in a nice neighborhood.

"Springfield Tire Fire, est. 1989"

fern, I may have been using the wrong terms, this certainly isn't my area of experitese. If I recall correctly the article was saying that the blue glacier was "growing" and becoming more volumptious (I love that word ) as the years went on. Again, I may have misread, misunderstood, etc.

I was reading an article 6 months or so ago and apparently the examples of glaciers surging over the past 100 years or so are few and far between. One of the examples, however, was the blue glacier on olympus, which has apparently been growing, along with a few in scandanavia. Their explanation was warmer weather patterns often bring an increase in precip, so for coastal regions which recieve absurd amounts of precip, it is enough to make up for the increased melting. I wonder if your example, Dru, falls in the same category.

In the interest of safety first, I would have to say that while the glaciers pn the ptarmigan traverse aren't very sketch, they *are* a hellavu lot more active (and broken) to the ruth, sahale and spider. Those three are about as tame as you can get, and compared to them the portions of the middle cascade and LeConte glaciers you have to cross are more challanging. I'm not at all saying it would be a bad idea to try, but if you are expecting them to be as benign as the sahale, spider and ruth I dont think they are. My 2 cents.

Dru, you are the shit, dogg!

Slabs scare me. I hate skinned knees. Yup. gGrils are good. So wonderful! Take care, have a good night everybody.

I got a pair of these to replace some older trail runners for the same reasons as you; the extra ankle support, but still in a very lightwegith package. Unfortunately I haven't been able to try them out yet, so I can't comment much on how they actually feel on a trail.

I gotta agree with you here. I've come to the conclusion that trying to force my hobbies on others, whether a girlfriend or just a buddy, never seems to work. The problem is the things that I generally seem to fall for in girls don't often coincide with climbing interests. I guess I like typical 'city girls' or something. I guess I've sort of accepted that having seperate interests isn't that bad.

That's a perfect climb for an alpine newbie. The nice surroundings will at least give you something to look at to keep your interest up. I'd take a light rope, as the exposure at the summit rocks (I think it's only 3rd class?) still might be enough to scare a newbie. From the moraine, the climb is super quick, might as well finish it off, plus she then gets to say she's walked a glacier, which is cool for some peeps.

Isnt soapstone a type of serpentinite? E rock? They're both asbestos silicates right? Beats me I thought the serpentine comment was a joke, I wasn't aware there was a type of rock called serpentinite. I just recognized the similarity to soapstone, which I had seen in rock collections, etc. before.

Nice pics. I assume this was a joke right? "Mike climbs 5.13 rock on right side of chute to get to the start of ridge "

Yeah, I've noticed it on the other side of Ingalls as well. It's almost like soapstone or something. Very slick.

Gary and MattP...great pics! Yikes...slabs scare me!

I have these boots. For a "ski" boot they climb awesome. I would say you find them about the same as any plastic mountaineering boot. With thermoflex liners, my pair of boots weighs about 1/2 a pound less than the same size Scarpa Invernos. As for skiing, they do all right, but certainly not what you would expect from a full ski boot. So far I've skiied the ptarmigan travese, C/D on Baker and the Sitkum on Glacier Peak and they did awesome on all of those skis, which featured mostly corn snow. I would say in anything hard to ski normally, the boots would be murder to ski however. I won't be relying on them as my all season touring boot, but for trips with easy skiing and lots of walking or climbing, they'll be my choice.

GPS is certainly no substitute for actually being able to navigate, but it can be really nice for moving faster through whiteout or confusing terrain. I got the most use out of mine on the ptarmigan traverse in June, where we navigated from the spider-formidable col to the white rock lakes, all in pretty much no visibility. While this certainly would have been possible without the GPS, the ease of "look and go" sure made it nice and fast.

necklace valley is awesome! la bohn gap above it is also very spectacular. mfk = ?? middle fork snoq?

I wish it was that cool. Come down this way. Mid 80s at 10:00. 18 days so far this month with daytime temps over 100. That is why I went up OR and WA way for the first half of July. Well to escape the heat, climb, hike and fish. Here's hoping it cools down for all of us. It's much hotter than that every day in phoenix, where my family lives. The point is in places where heat is expected you've got A/C, swamp coolers, etc. The heat effects the PNW much more than Cali, areas further south, etc.

I know several gay couples rasing kids and in every instance the child is getting much better parenting then plenty of "traditional" families I know.

Agreed. I don't think he was saying that it would be wrong to ban gay marriages. Just pointing out some history about some of the reasons the gov't got into the marriage business to begin with. And I agree completely with Josh's second point. RuMR, yup, you are correct. I totally agree with Ehmmic that the laws of this partnership we call marriage need to be protected by laws, courts, etc. What I said (poorly, admittidly) is that the government should *not* have a hand in defining who can enter into these partnerships, be them two men, two women, or one of each. I think people who radically oppose the idea of gay marriage are going to look as out of date in 20 years as the people who opposed mixed-race marriages do today. Unfortuantely, we still have plenty of idiots in this world that oppose mixed race marriage.

Independent of what anybody may or may not think of gay marriages, I believe two things: 1.)The government should get the fuck out of marriage, hetero or homo. It ain't their business. Marriage is about communiion between two people, not a fucking business relationship to be mandated by the government. 2.)With all the shit that is wrong in this country today, and going on across the globe, this is really what bush the dumbfuck needs to be spending his time on? Hell no! It's his typical pandering to the religious right crap. Try fixing a real problem, you sorry ass joke excuse for a leader.

3 days is not a push. the traverse itself is pretty easy in 3 days. It's long, but not *that* long. I would agree with ncascades tho, take some more time and climb a bunch of the peaks along the way

Maybe a dumb question, but what are LZs? Landing Zones?? If so, what fer?

Hey, if you got the boat, I'm down to drink beer, spot, and work on my tan!